GUEST ARTICLE BY SUPER BAD ADVICE
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They say you never miss the water until the well runs dry. Which may be true, but who are ‘they’ and why don’t they just use the tap like any normal person, or if thirsty just buy some Um Bongo? What are they, medieval peasants?
 
Of course, I’m joking – it’s just a figure of speech like “He who has rubber arms can’t lift a bag of spuds, but he’s a cracking bodypopper!” and “Stop touching that, it’s already bleeding”. In this case, it means people often take things for granted. And oh look, here’s a silly arse who did that coming along now: me.
 
To cut a long story short (because as you’ll soon realise, typing is literally and figuratively a right pain for me at the moment), a few weeks back I fell awkwardly on to some concrete and well and truly buggered up my right arm – which is my ‘doing’ arm, assuming I want to do whatever it is I’m doing with any level of accuracy and competence. Broken bone sticking out, an operation, pins in my wrist and everything.

Not every game can be massive, especially in an era where the market is dominated by big, annual, franchise releases. Indeed, with development costs being higher than ever, it can be a risk for publishers and developers to try and create a new franchise.

You expect the less-good games to do bad... but what about those great games which never got a fair shout? How many of those have there been? Well now... according to this list, there have been at least ten of these so-called "Flaccid Fenstons". Maybe more - who knows?

Who cares? 

This list is what truly matters right now.

Oh, Nintendo. You have such a friendly public face, but deep down you're pure sod. You're like a kind clown with a short temper, who will occasionally kick a dog up the bottom so hard that its colon pops out of its mouth, making it look like it's blowing a kiss.

Admittedly, most big corporations end up in a courtroom sooner or later, but Nintendo has a particularly knee-jerk history when it comes to inflating its legal balloon... as well as often being on the opposite end of the statutory balloon-bounce from others.

Here are 7 times Nintendo felt the need - the need for speed (to unleash its lawyers).

Remember when games first started arriving on CDs? Remember how that was going to be the future, and how they said that one day everything would one day be coming out on CD; movies, food, hats... even horseys?

Well, CD-ROM was the future... but before we got to that future we had to endure the awfulness of the first wave or two of CD-ROM games. You know: like having to walk through a carpark full of tramp manure before you can reach Lidl.

You can't really blame the developers of the era. It's not their fault that they were all idiots who didn't really stop to think that games could be made better by using the huge storage potential of CD. They just thought it meant they could do video, and saw it as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel. Indeed, this is the point at which "cinematic" cut-scenes were born, for better or worse, and all game developers began thinking they could be Hollywood directors.

It's telling, however, that while many of the earliest video games from the 1980s have stood the test of time, the vast majority of those early CD-ROM games... have not.

​Here are 10 that made the biggest stink at the time.

Every year when I do a series of E3 round-up articles - whether it's tongue-in-cheek or sincere - it gets less hits than if I just put a list of a old things for you to remember. 

In all honesty, I might not bother next time. I have a love/hate thing when it comes to E3 anyway. I mean, I've never visited the show... but I find the online coverage - the pre-show presentations - overwhelming enough as it is. 

And not just overwhelming... but underwhelming. When I see all the new games rolled out in a production line, for me it just highlights the weaknesses in the approach of where the industry is at currently.
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Here are six reasons in particular why this year's E3 left me feeling disenchanted.

With E3 2018 well underway, the big players have started displaying the games that they'll be releasing over the next year or two.

The latest major player to hold a presentation was Ubisoft. Here's a blow-by-blow account of what turned out to be a highly eccentric event. 

Celebrities are the best aren't they? They're like us, except they're famous for some reason or other, and they go to the gym and watch what they eat and they get photographed with make-up and nice lighting and that, thus reminding us what ungodly, useless, hideous, monstrosities we ordinary folk really are. 

They're like normal people, but with all the flaws edited away or airbrushed out; sort of the other end of the primate scale to monkeys, I suppose. No wonder we idolise them - and then point and laugh when they show signs that they might be human after all. "HA HA! That'll learn 'em to be portrayed as better than us!".

But anyway. Celebrities haven't just been confined to films and television and magazines and stuff. Sometimes they also appear in video games. Here are 10 of the more unlikely celeb gaming cameos.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

I'm a bit obsessed with games packaging. Well, old games packaging. And "obsessed" might be pushing it. I suppose I'm more mildly interested, but that seems like a pathetic justification for an entire article on the subject. 

For me, the boxes were always part of the experience - and why I never really bought into pirated games in the way many of my peers did. I wanted games delivered in the way their creators intended - with the manuals, and box artwork, and all the razzmatazz. Even now, holding an old game in its original packaging can send a shiver along my spine. Although, that might just be a herniated disc.

Ha ha - I'm probably going to end up in a wheelchair! 

Anyway, with downloading fast becoming the standard way in which games are delivered, packaging, alas, seems to be dying out. Yes, that's good for the environment, of course (though, frankly, do we really need all those polar bears? I've never even seen one in real life, so it's not like I'm going to miss them), but it also - for me - dilutes the emotions a bit.

With this in mind, let us now celebrate the golden age of games packaging. 

GUEST POST BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

Like some sort of technological Dignitas, Sony have announced that the PS4 is officially in the end part of its life cycle. It’s arguable that belching out such a diktat while your competitors respectively have a more powerful console and a more innovative console for sale, and you’ve not even got anything announced yet, is a real stupid move that will give potential customers ‘the wet willies’.

But then who are we to argue with the genius creators of the MiniDisc?
 
However, to get you ‘pumped’ for the newest arrival in the format wars we can bring you these exclusive facts about the all-new PS5 thanks to our special spies embedded at Sony HQ (and by special we mean they only exist in our minds – we don’t even know where Sony HQ is! Probably Uttoxeter?)
 
Each one is literally more true and fabby than the last, and here they come!

When I was a lad there were basically three home computers that anybody had (barring those weirdoes whose parents had bought them an Oric or Dragon 32); the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, and the BBC Micro. Generalising hugely, ownership of these three machines were - respectively - working class children, middle class children, and rich-o-posh kids who lived in mansions, and were called things like Peregrine and Farnsworthingtonsil and Trebuchet Bournville III.

Not to "bee" confused with a "model bee", the BBC Microcomputer Model B was designed by Acorn Computers for the BBC Computer Literacy Project (a way to introduce people to myriad joys of computer use).

Both the 16k Model A and 32k Model B were released in late-1981, and the system was sold with an emphasis on being boring (education) - which is why it was, for much of the 1980s, the computer of choice for schools. 

Nevertheless, like all gadgets, it soon became known for its games, and - due to the power it concealed beneath its nicotine-yellow carapace - it did games real good. 

Despite being a Spectrum owner, I was lucky enough to have access to the BBC through my mother. She worked in a school for naughty children, as a classroom assistant, and would regularly bring the school's BBC home for the weekend. Presumably, to stop them sneaking back into the school and stealing it (a gang of them once locked the headmaster in a classroom, stood in a circle around him, and passed an air pistol to one another).

The BBC was a proper powerhouse of a machine. Aside from the fact it was bigger and more expensive, the one I played on came with a proper monitor. Consequently, the graphics were sharper and more arcade-like than the C64 and Speccy could ever dream of. 

Now get this: here are my 10 favourite BBC Micro games. And no... Granny's Garden isn't one of them.